Petrosian

Troubleshooting

Logging

ManageIQ has extensive logging to assist in troubleshooting issues or just seeing what is being worked on.

Appliance Logging

Viewing Logs

On appliances logging is managed using the built-in systemd-journal system. Journald uses database-like binary files to store log lines along with extensive metadata.

There is a journalctl command-line utility which can be used to query the journal. Documentation for journalctl can be found at https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/journalctl.1.html

If you want to tail the main evm logs then you can use journalctl -f -t evm. Other logs (e.g.: automation or api) can be viewed by using their syslog_identifier e.g. journalctl -f -t automation. You can also view multiple logs by using journalctl -f -t evm -t automation -t api.

journalctl allows you to do much more like view logs for a specific unit (aka worker), for a time range, and for a group of workers (e.g. every generic worker).

Here are some helpful examples:

Viewing:

  • View all logs: journalctl
  • View all logs, most recent first: journalctl -r
  • View all logs since the last boot: journalctl -b
  • View all logs from the previous boot: journalctl -b -1
  • View all logs from a time range: journalctl --since "1 hour ago"
  • View all logs with extra metadata: journalctl --output verbose
  • Tail all logs: journalctl -f

Filtering:

  • Filter warnings: journalctl -f -p warning
  • Filter errors: journalctl -f -p err
  • Filter warnings and errors: journalctl -f -p err -p warning
  • Logs for a specific unit: journalctl -f -u manageiq-generic@51113329-8942-4a4c-98d6-1e532656c569.service
  • Logs for a group of workers: journalctl -f -u manageiq-generic.slice
  • Logs matching a pattern: journalctl -g '(Started|Stopping) EVM server'' (accepts perl compatible regular expressions)
  • Logs for a specific identifier: journalctl -f -t evm

Other:

  • Export to a file: journalctl --output export > export.log
  • Rotate the current journal to an archive: journalctl --rotate
  • Clear out all archived journals: journalctl --vacuum-time=1s
  • Clear out journal archives over a day old: journalctl --vacuum-time=1d

Almost all of these can be combined together where they don’t conflict (e.g. -f can’t be used with -r)

Collecting Logs

If you have to collect logs from appliances for diagnostic purposes there are a couple utilities that are provided for this purpose.

To collect logs from only a single appliance you can use collect_current_logs.sh or collect_archive_logs.sh. To use these utilities you should ssh to the appliance and cd /var/www/miq/vmdb/tools/collect_logs directory.

Now run ./collect_current_logs.sh or ./collect_archive_logs.sh depending on if you want the latest or all logs.

The output will be in /var/www/miq/vmdb/log/evm_current_HOSTNAME_TIMESTAMP.tar.xz or /var/www/miq/vmdb/log/evm_archive_HOSTNAME_TIMESTAMP.tar.xz

To collect logs from all appliances in the region over ssh we provide a collect_all_logs utility. This iterates over all MiqServer records in the region and collects the output of collect_current_logs.sh rolled up into a single .tar.xz file.

Podified Logging

When running in podified all logs are output to the container’s stdout which is picked up by Kubernetes/OpenShift and made available via kubectl logs/oc logs.

The log output format is in JSON and includes extra metadata like the log-level, timestamp:

{
  "@timestamp":"2020-01-01T12:34:56.789012",
  "pid":12345,
  "tid":"6789abcdef01",
  "level":"info",
  "message":"MIQ(Class#method) Example message"
}

You can also pass a label selector to oc logs with -l so for example to tail all generic pods: oc logs -f -l name=1-generic

If you prefer to view the container JSON logs in the standard MIQ format you can use the unjson_logs utility. This utility is in /var/www/miq/vmdb/tools/unjson_logs

oc logs -l name=1-ui | tools/unjson_logs
[----] I, [2022-06-16T15:40:21.095098 #7:b4e4c]  INFO -- production: Started GET "/ems_infra/56?display=vms" for 127.0.0.1 at 2022-06-16 15:40:21 +0000
[----] I, [2022-06-16T15:40:21.100999 #7:b4e4c]  INFO -- production: Processing by EmsInfraController#show as HTML
[----] I, [2022-06-16T15:40:21.101242 #7:b4e4c]  INFO -- production:   Parameters: {"display"=>"vms", "id"=>"56"}